Richard Littauer talks about birds, hats, and commitments

julia ferraioli:
Hi, everyone. My name is julia ferraioli. My pronouns are she/her, and I am here today on a very, very rainy afternoon in Seattle, recording this for Open Source Stories. And I’m joined today by Richard Littauer. And I am really excited to chat with you, Richard. Do you want to introduce yourself a little bit?

Richard Littauer:
Sure. I’m excited to be here as well. Thank you for inviting me. This is exciting. I just said that. I just said that. Yeah, I’m Richard, I do a lot of stuff. I wear a lot of hats in open source. I’m a maintainer. I’m a coder. I’m a contributor. I’m a designer. But most people probably know me as that guy who runs the Sustain podcast, where I talk about sustaining open source. I also help out with other Sustain stuff like organizing the working groups and the conferences. And I also work at Open Source Collective, where we’re trying to figure out how to work together and make a community of the 4000 projects that are hosted there on Open Collective, which is cool. And I also host another community on digital infrastructure. And some people also know me as The Bird Dude. I have an open source website called Birding in Vermont. So those are the hats that people know me under, I think most of the time.

The everyday surprise of birds

julia ferraioli:
It is hard for you to see this and definitely hard for people listening in to see this but I am wearing a bird shirt in your honor.

Richard Littauer:
Hahaha! So you are! Awesome. I didn’t notice that. That’s cool!

julia ferraioli:
Um, what’s your favorite bird?

Richard Littauer:
Oh, man. You know, my favorite bird is the last one I just saw. It’s not really my favorite bird. I don’t really have a favorite bird. But I was just walking down downtown Montpelier in Vermont where I live. I go for a walk every day, a couple times a day. And an American Kestrel landed on top of city hall right on top of the spire and I was taking a photo with my iPhone and like, I wish I had my big camera lens and I realized I carry a backpack for exactly that reason, Richard, so I pulled it out and got some photos and I was so so chuffed about it because I’ve only seen them once before in the city limits. And that was really cool. I guess actually, my favorite bird might be a cousin of that. Gyrfalcon is a falcon I’ve never seen—it’s an arctic Falcon. It’s bigger than a Peregrine and totally gray and just monstrous. Wow. It’s fell. You know? It’s a fell bird.

julia ferraioli:
Yeah. I’m gonna have to look that one up. And maybe we can put a picture of it in the in this story as well.

Richard Littauer:
That would be cool. Yeah, g-y-r falcon. Oh, and I’m also wearing my bird shirt. This is my Vermont park staff shirt. I never actually worked there. I just got a free T-shirt from my friend who did. And I wear this whenever I’m working on my book of birds subspecies that I’m writing at the moment.

julia ferraioli:
Oh, wow!

Richard Littauer:
This is my lucky writing shirt. So it’s also a green breeding shirt.

Francis Bacon and eggs, and too many commitments

julia ferraioli:
So are you one of those people with the gene that you don’t have to sleep very much?

Richard Littauer:
[laughs] I wish I was! I really wish I was. I am not, it sucks. It sucks so much. I need a minimum of seven hours to feel normal, but preferably 10.

julia ferraioli:
Wow.

Richard Littauer:
Yep. Not easy. Yeah.

julia ferraioli:
Okay, well, your hats seem to be piling up in the corner over there, so hopefully you get to take them off at some point and relax.

Richard Littauer:
Well, I relax by doing other stuff. You know, I relaxed by working on other things. That’s— I’m not very good at relaxing. I don’t really Netflix.

julia ferraioli:
I probably Netflix too much considering everything I say yes to. Yeah,

Richard Littauer:
That’s fair. Yeah. I just unsubscribed. And now I just don’t have Netflix and it works really well. But yeah.

julia ferraioli:
So my— my surprise, fun, fun question because it wasn’t about birds. What’s going on with Francis Bacon?

Richard Littauer:
Yeah, okay. “Francis Bacon and eggs” is really dumb. It’s really dumb. So years ago, I just randomly thought of the phrase “Francis Bacon and eggs”. I don’t remember why I thought of it. I don’t remember how it happened. But then the other thought — it’s actually, actually don’t remember the origin at all. I just remember being like “That should be a cooking show. I have a book of Francis Bacon here. I have a funny tweed jacket. I’m gonna read Francis Bacon and make eggs.” And so I have a YouTube channel called “Francis Bacon and eggs.” It’s like 15 episodes long. There’s this little nice music at the beginning and the end. I’m not a good cook. I don’t try to be a good cook. I don’t try to be a good reader either. I just read Francis Bacon and make eggs and you get what you pay for, which is nothing because it’s free. And it’s really fun. I really like it. It’s dumb. Yeah.

julia ferraioli:
That’s awesome. I think I might know the origin.

Richard Littauer:
Oh, what is it? What is it?

julia ferraioli:
So I believe there was an Ask Reddit thread ages ago about things that you misheard.

Richard Littauer:
I’ve seen this one. I like this one a lot. I think of this a lot.

julia ferraioli:
And it was like this one person who said that their father would say quotes, and then say Francis Bacon.

Richard Littauer:
Francis Bacon!

julia ferraioli:
And they misheard it as “France is Bacon.”

Richard Littauer:
Yeah, I love that. I love that. “France is Bacon” is gonna be the best QED like statement ever. You know, like, bam, nope, “France is Bacon”, over. The funny thing is that Francis Bacon is really in until like, unintelligible. He’s a horrible writer. Like his essays are basically the worst written blog posts of all time. They’re not well formed. They’re not particularly logical. And it’s, it’s all antiquarian English now it’s— Yeah, I don’t know why I keep doing it. But every now and then I just make another episode. And— Francis Bacon!

julia ferraioli:
It’s your version of “My Drunk Kitchen.”

Richard Littauer:
Well, I already have a drunk company.

julia ferraioli:
Well, there, that’s true. See, hats!

Richard Littauer:
Too many hats!

julia ferraioli:
Too many hats. Not enough amount of heads!.

Richard Littauer:
Just not enough, actually— performing on the commitments I actually made. Mostly, my life has a long history of promising stuff and then being like, “Sorry, I did this other thing instead. Love me anyway?”

julia ferraioli:
Wow. That’s extremely relatable.

Richard Littauer:
Yeah. The pressure of commitments in open source

julia ferraioli:
Do you— How do I formulate the question I want to ask, because I feel like this is a natural segue to open source.

Richard Littauer:
Do I have ADHD? What are you going to ask?

julia ferraioli:
Well, I’m wondering, do you think that the culture of open source drives us to some of — some of that behavior? The overcommitting? Do you think there’s a pressure there?

Richard Littauer:
Yes. Yes, I think there is, I think what’s difficult is that most, most of the open source code I’ve seen and most of people I know who’ve done it didn’t start because they had a really well planned architecture. They didn’t have a cathedral lined out and they weren’t starting to build the basement. They were very much looking at their neighbor’s stall in the bazaar and saying I could sell that better. And then writing a new program to try to do it and then getting way too obsessed with like, how the things were laid out in their stall in the bazaar. I like the word over-committing because it has kind of a double entendre there, right? Like, too many commits, too many commits. Oh, wait, fix this. Fix this. Grrrrr. Okay, finally fixed it in four commits to that like could have been one. Yeah. I think that the natural instinct to create something new without worrying about the downstream effects is like the story of open source.

Open source is everywhere (and not)

julia ferraioli:
It’s, there’s an interesting tension to between the usability, or the approachability of open source to new people, and the proliferation of projects.

Richard Littauer:
You know, I don’t know what new people look like in open source anymore. I rarely, rarely talk to people who are just entering. I talked to a lot of people who’ve been in this space for five years, and a lot more had been in it for 20 or 30. But I don’t talk to a lot of people who are like, entry level engineers try to get involved with open source and I imagine that they’re horrified because nothing makes sense. And they suddenly have to have a portfolio and they don’t understand stuff. I would love to talk to more like code academies or something like who are the people who are just learning about it now and how do they experience it? I have no idea.

julia ferraioli:
It’s interesting because, you know, we’ve got GitHub for Education, right? Lots of universities and colleges. And I imagine the high schools at this point are using GitHub as how they turn in homework.

Richard Littauer:
Yep. Cool.

julia ferraioli:
And specifically, like Jupyter Notebooks— I was about to say IPython notebooks and realize that would, that hasn’t been a thing since ages. So—

Richard Littauer:
That’s how I learned! We didn’t have GitHub when I was when I was a student. It was annoying. I actually told some of my teachers about it. And they’re like, “Okay, please stop raising your hand to class, Richard.” And, yeah, it is. It is interesting. When you think of schools, I guess I wasn’t thinking of schools, I was thinking of just normal coders. But of course, people are being taught coding now. A huge amount that I — I always forget about. I just messaged a friend of mine around 30 minutes ago asking if he does any open source code, because I want to talk to people who aren’t normal coders. He’s a postdoc at MIT. He studies gravity waves. He’s probably the smartest person I know. Definitely rocks, smarts. He always loses to me at Risk unless his wife gangs up with him, like last time anyway. And he was like, “What’s open source again?” Okay. I don’t understand how people don’t know, in academia, but apparently there are still people. So I’m really interested in that response to like, who’s teaching it and who isn’t learning so far?

julia ferraioli:
I bet. I bet we can find you, like, if you really want to do this, we can we can find you a cohort of—

Richard Littauer:
Sure. Why not!

julia ferraioli:
That was actually an idea that I had for a theme to do a series of let’s talk to like, people just entering the world of open source for like, five or six interviews, story sessions.

Richard Littauer:
Yeah, that would be great. I mean, I taught people five years ago, I used to mentor classes at Les Pitonneux, which is a code school in Montreal and that was really fun. But it hasn’t —it’s been a while.

Definitions, representations, and semantics

julia ferraioli:
Yeah. So I actually, I actually took a look at your thesis in preparation for —

Richard Littauer:
Oh, no!

julia ferraioli:
I know!

Richard Littauer:
Which one? The one on Open Source Code for Low Resource Languages?

julia ferraioli:
Yes.

Richard Littauer:
Yeah. Cool.

julia ferraioli:
Yes. So and I was very, very interested to go to the “What is Open Source — Definition”

Richard Littauer:
Oh, man, I don’t remember writing that. That was a while ago. What did I mess it up?

julia ferraioli:
I mean, no, I mean, you, you you defined it, very technically referenced a lot of the tried and trues— “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”, which you mentioned, or you were alluding to earlier in this conversation, OSI —all of that, all of that stuff. I’m wondering though, how would you define it now?

Richard Littauer:
How would I define open source? I go with Tobie Langel’s definition, which is a bit different, or his graph, which is that open source is actually much larger than just the OSI and OSD. I think for that thesis, I was doing it technically, because I was having to pass a German technical board in order to get my master’s degree. So it was like, ehhh what I’m going to do. But I like the idea that open source is a larger tent. It’s much more a culture. It’s much more a community, even though community a horrible word is often just misused everywhere, as much people working together in a similar way, maybe another way of saying it’s a method. But I don’t think open source has much to do anymore with the license, because that’s such a small part of it. It’s a part that enables the rest, sure! And it’s still accurate to say that open source code is a code that has been licensed legally, blindly, whatever. But yeah, I would say it’s the culture of giving back more than you take if you can, or just giving back at all, and thinking about your upstream and downstream dependencies in a way that doesn’t take them for granted. Yeah, and a commons. I often think of it as a commons, a digital commons.

julia ferraioli:
One of the problems that I see people running into and especially for folks newer in their open source community— said the word— is that people do have these different interpretations of, of what it means—

Richard Littauer:
Yup.

julia ferraioli:
— and how do you think the importance of language factors in to how we interact with each other and the broader ecosystem?

Richard Littauer:
You’re begging the question. The importance of language is begging the question is—

Sorry.

No, it’s okay. I’m just pointing it out. Right. I look up a word today — mushburgers. Someone defined a wave as “mushburgers”. “We went over some mushburger waves” and I was like, “What the frick does that mean?” This is William Finnegan’s— Finnegans book, “Barbarian Days” on surfing. And I looked for the word on Google and the only example of mushburgers, which I know what it means. It’s very clear what mushburgers means, if you’re an English speaker, it’s like just a crappy kind of mushy wave. I don’t know why you’d say burger, but like I get it. And the only definitions came from clippings from people being like, what words is this from his book. And so it’s clearly like, it’s just a new word. That’s a surfer jargon that hasn’t really entered mainstream. And that’s cool. And that’s fine. So it doesn’t have to be OED definition. So when I think about open source and the importance of open source, I don’t actually think about that, like I don’t care about open source, I don’t care, like at all. Open Source is, is not something I care about. I care about people. And people work together in this one culture/community, culture is probably a better word ecosystem. I have a friend who uses the word ecology, in this ecology in a really interesting way. And a lot of them are my friends. And those are the people I actually get up and work for, or think about, or try to help. Or feel anxious about disappointing, therefore, make action so that I can make them not disappointed in me. But what about the importance of open source and having a technical definition? I’m not Stefano. it’s not my job to be the president of the OSI. It’s not my job to be a policeman. And if anything, being a linguist, my degrees in linguistics, has taught me to be descriptive, not prescriptive, which is a prescriptive statement. But just I just look at it like, “Oh, that’s cool. You’re using that way. Like, ethical source isn’t open source. Cool. That’s maybe true for you. That’s not true. For me. I think it’s open source. And if people say, “Well, it’s not.” You know, whatever.

Confections, fractions, and fractures

julia ferraioli:
How do you, how do you bring people together? When talking about open source?

Richard Littauer:
Offer cake.

julia ferraioli:
Offer cake? Is that what you said?

Richard Littauer:
Yeah!

julia ferraioli:
I think that’s a very good tactic. So I’m all for that. Especially if I’m on the receiving end of the cake. So yeah, okay, Cake.

Richard Littauer:
Cake is good. No, how do I — how do you bring people together to talk about open source? Well, I don’t, I’m not saying I don’t use the word. I use it all the time, forever and ever and ever. And I say I care about it all the time. But like, it’s not the open source that matters, it’s the shared idea of open source and I’m just very happy with it being fuzzy. Because the fuzziness isn’t what I’m here to do. I’m not here to put a structure on it. I’m here to connect people. And that’s what I— mainly what I do when I bring people together on open source stuff is I say, “Here are things you could do to make your life easier if you’re already in this culture.” Or “If you want to be in this culture here are the things you could do to be more open sourcey.” You know, it’s kind of like “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, if you don’t have to define what goodness is, you just know what goodness is because it’s a quality. It’s a thing in the world. And I think all things are that way. We don’t have to go around looking for Neoplatonic chairs, they’re just a reference what a chair is, then ask people to sit in them.

julia ferraioli:
This might be my favorite conversation this week. So thank you. What do you see coming on the horizon? For like, what’s the next big crisis for open source?

Richard Littauer:
Well, the out — um, is a few answers. Ecosystem collapse is one of them. So that’s pretty bad. That’s going to affect everything. And that’s the answer above all answers. Open source will not be here in 200 years because it’s likely that this culture won’t be here in 200 years, which is great and awful, at the same time. So that’s one answer. Second answer is I think that we’re seeing fractions in the open source movement. And the fractions are going to eventually divide it in a way that will be unmaintainable. One of them is politics, because we already have that in America like the last 40 years has been a long story of downward mobility in America and extremism. And I don’t see that changing in open source, we already have people like, you know, I’m not gonna mention the things I don’t want to talk about. But fraction is happening. Also political fractions between, say, Ukraine, Russia, open source coders not really working well together right now or China, all sorts things where America also being a corporate or horrible superpower. So those are some other things. But those are easy answers. The harder answer is, I think we’re going to see a falling out of the barrel of people who actually want to commit to open source anymore because they can’t be bothered. And I think it’s just gonna get worse. And what’s going to happen then as you’re going to get corporate extraction on a massive scale, and people taking random modules and then making something else and open source ceasing to be a word that’s actually useful as a way to think about the community and instead just being away from large corporations stuck to there— and I think this is already happening in a very, very big way. The JavaScript community is not what it was five years ago, which stinks it makes me sad, but that’s how it is. So we’re gonna see more of that falling out, we’re gonna see more deaths among the community, with people just leaving large swaths of code unmaintained. And we’re gonna see corporate investment and not-corporate, like— governmental investment in a way that will be one-sided and lead to a lot of grift. And that’s not going to be good either. And it already is.

julia ferraioli:
Yep, that’s, yeah, no, no, no, I asked, I asked the question I deserve the answer. Or answers.

Richard Littauer:
The other answer is we’re gonna see people move away from open source, that’s just a catch all term for everything. Because they’re not defining it. I mean, I’m part of that problem. But the larger problem is that open source right now depends upon unmaintained people trying to bump their CVs up. But at some point, CVs won’t matter very much, because you won’t be able to get the job very easily. And so open source just becomes this sort of large wash, where people are actually working without pay and then not being able to afford their lives, which again, leads to more downward mobility for people in the middle class right now who have gotten there with open source. I think it’ll get worse if you don’t save up. So— doom and gloom.

julia ferraioli:
Factor in— burnout. Factor in the fact that sometimes open source leads to the neglect of other parts of your life. Yep. It can. It can wear, it can wear you out for sure.

Richard Littauer:
Yeah, not everyone has the ability to go walking for an hour and a half every day. That’s what I do. You know, I had to get away from my screen. And I have really strong connections in my community. But that’s because I went out and spent a lot of effort on them at the expense of other things. So yeah, not great. Not cool. But also, you know, humanity will continue. And there’s always going to be artists on the edges making really pretty things. So that’s cool. Let’s look at those.

On protecting boundaries and caring for your whole self

julia ferraioli:
What would you tell somebody that’s just coming in to open source however you define it, to help steer the ship to help avoid personal over-commitment, over-burnout? I guess over-burnout as well, is redundant. But how would you? How would you advise them?

Richard Littauer:
Decide if you want to be a specialist or not. If you don’t want to be a specialist, don’t code. Stop. Be a specialist in something else. Be a specialist in community management. Be a specialist in design. Because being able to inhabit multiple different hats, multiple different like areas is going to give you a much more resilient network in the face of small changes. So if you’re going to be a specialist on p2p programming, you better be really good at it and spend a lot of time on it. And you must enjoy spending six hours a day working on that sort of stuff. I didn’t have that. And I, I thought I was bad for years, until I realized I don’t have to do that. And then I was much happier. So if you’re gonna do open source, I would, I would say that, like, be really good at what you do and commit to it. Or recognize that committing is hard, know your boundaries and decide to actually be the person who connects other people who are good at that sort of stuff. Those are the main things I would say, if you’re not going to either of things, recognize that open source will have limited gifts to give you and so don’t lean on it as the only thing in your life. Lean on your business skills. Lean on your family skills. Lean on other things that will help you continue to use this as a measured way to maybe, partially improve things, in the same way good fiscal responsibility with your grocery shopping, helps you but doesn’t necessarily solve everything.

julia ferraioli:
That is very good advice. And I think as applicable far beyond the world of open source.

Richard Littauer:
It’s also pretty general. But I wish someone had told me that you know. Actually, someone did. Vlad did say read this entire book. And when I didn’t read it, I realized, “Oh, okay, I’m not gonna be a good JavaScript programmer, because I didn’t read the book. Cool.” What else can I do?

julia ferraioli:
What is bringing you joy right now?

Richard Littauer:
Oh, man — what is bringing me joy? Reading. Having space. Really, it’s this stupid fitness routine I’m doing again, I haven’t done it like two years. It’s called 75 Hard. It’s made for bodybuilders who want to get swole and stuff. But like, the whole idea is you work out an hour and a half every day, one of which has to be outside, you drink a gallon of water, you read 10 pages of a book that’s helpful for work, you visualize success for 10 minutes, you have a five minute cold shower, then you take a progress photo, then you do eight hard things, which aren’t habits yet, but what you want to be habits that you have to do before you go to bed. And you follow a diet. And if you do all those things, it turns out A, you get exhausted and then you get over it and learn how to set smaller things to do, and B, you feel really good about yourself because you’re well slept, well hydrated, well fed and well worked out and you’re doing stuff at work that makes you feel good. So it’s almost impossible to like, lose. And I really enjoyed this program. I wouldn’t suggest anyone do it. But every time I do it, my life just immediately is like, “Wow, cool, I feel good.”

julia ferraioli:
I mean, I do some of that I drink four liters of water a day and I exercise for an hour and a half most days. But more on the, like, “Let’s keep the body from falling apart”, rather than the “Let’s get swole sort of thing”.

Richard Littauer:
Well, for me, it’s not about getting tall for me, for me, I just, that’s the people who made it, they’re like, you know, yeah, it’s a lot of gym rats. But like, for me, like, I just feel better if I do that. And if I don’t, I’ll get depressed. And if I get depressed, which you know, that’s just how my body works, it’s kind of sad, then I don’t work very well. And then I get more depressed. And then I have a whole cycle downward. And it takes a while to get out of it. Whereas if I just do this, it’s much harder for me to cycle downward. And as much easier for me, I was gonna merge a PR today that I felt really had to be merged. And I was like, “Okay, let’s do this. Okay.” And then I’m like, “You know what, Richard? A year ago, you said in an issue with the you’re giving up maintainership of this repo.” And I pressed Command-W and haven’t looked back. I didn’t have to do it. And now that power was there, because I’m like, I’m already satisfied in other parts of my life. I don’t need to feel good about merging.

julia ferraioli:
For listeners in the future, where keyboards are no longer a thing— that closed the window.

Richard Littauer:
Yeah, it was great. It was great.

julia ferraioli:
Trying to future proof this thing. Any parting thoughts for us today before we wrap up?

Richard Littauer:
Ummm, parting thoughts. Hmmm — not really, I’m just really grateful. I’m really grateful. I write down people who I’m grateful for every day, three people in the morning, first thing in the morning. And it’s a really good practice. And I’m grateful for you for accepting the fact that I was 15 minutes late because I was on my walk and forgot. And I’m grateful for this being able to be here. And I’m grateful to everyone and open source has continued to — well, not that guy, but everyone else knows for us has continued to bring me joy and happiness. So thank you.

julia ferraioli:
Well, thank you, Richard. I’m grateful for you and I will close this session. Leaving all of you wondering if you’re that guy.

The story was facilated by julia ferraioli